The Arts Bermuda Triangle

Sorry, But I Kinda Want the Money Too

Being an artist is hard, but we have no right to complain. It is no harder, say, than duties that are more explicitly and practically useful. A nurse. A sewerage worker. A lawyer. An administration manager.

We spend a lot of time trying to convince ourselves that art is different from these vocations. That it’s more special or romantic.We’re attempting to compensate for our insecurities about a career in the arts by shouting obnoxiously about a false superiority.

A career in the arts is just like any other. You work hard towards the aim of earning enough money to provide shelter, food and wellbeing for yourself and your family.

‘But we all know we’re not here for the money,’ slurs a peer from over the rim of an opening night champagne glass.

Oh.

Well, I kinda am.

At least in part.

Sorry, not sorry.

I feel dirty about admitting this, but it’s true. I aim to earn a sufficient income as an artist to support a modest yet middle-class lifestyle. What a dream. I don’t think that dream diminishes my artistic capacity. Instead, it challenges me to a kind of rigour in my work, a specific definition of success that helps me narrow my field of vision towards what’s attainable. Actually, ‘dream’ is too lofty a word. It’s a plan.

However, I’ve only recently accepted this capitalist drive within myself. It’s taken me a couple of decades of being an arts professional - at times hideously unemployed, at times drowning in a flood of work - to understand that an arts career is defined in three pieces. It’s an arbitrary framework, but it helps me know what’s important. It helps me remember the goal.

These three pieces form a kind of Artist’s Bermuda Triangle where I think many careers go missing. Or worse, our careers get sucked into the triangle and our souls along with it, and we’re plunged into psychic despair.

The three points of the triangle are thus: fame, competence and success. They are not the same thing.

Think about that.

Fame.

Competence.

Success.

They are not the same thing.

They do not move in a single, straight line. Remove all notions of straight lines from your concept of a career in the arts. You don’t ‘make it’.

You won’t reach a point of no return where creative fulfilment or income is ever assured.

There is only a messy web, gig upon gig.

In my view, the three points are interrelated, but you can only choose one to be your primary focus. You can care about the other two points, but only one will be the real thing that keeps you going, the bar by which you measure your growth.

Let’s take a drive-by of the three points.

Fame

Fame doesn’t equal competence, and it doesn’t equal success. Fame equals fame. It has its uses, but at the level that many of us dream about, where we serve an audience of millions, things get weird.

I’ve known and worked with a good handful of famous people now, and I can tell you that they’re not universally happy. They haven’t figured something out that we haven’t. Of all three elements, fame is the most based in luck. It is cruel and unfair, but having seen fame up close, I don’t particularly wish for it as I did when I was younger. Hyper-fame generally registers as a traumatic event for most people. The loss of anonymity frequently comes with an identity crisis.

For many, fame arises because they are highly competent at one thing. When you are famous for one thing, it is hard to then become famous for other things. If Jamie Oliver picked up a guitar and insisted we all take him seriously as a death metal artist, we wouldn’t award him much recognition beyond a punch line.

But a career pivot needn’t be so dramatic as to switch art forms. Think of the countless sitcom stars who are iconic in one role, but then struggle to find a place beyond the show that made them famous. It took the cast of Seinfeld about fifteen years before any of them struck it big again on TV. But even more subtle - can you ever watch Tom Hanks or Merryl Streep in a movie and forget that it’s those stars playing the role? Isn’t there a certain Hanks-ness and Streep-ness that we rely upon when we buy the ticket?

‘Oh yes,’ you say, your champagne glass now empty, ‘poor them. How dreadful for them.’

Yes, I get it. They have a lot of money, and a lot of opportunities. They get to hang out with other famous people, which is fun if you like that sort of thing. But personally, I’m not sure the cost of entry is worth it for the cool kids table. But, if you want fame I don’t think there’s shame in it, but it will help if you’re honest about it and don’t hide behind some artistic, romantic pursuit.

Fame is its own alchemy this days. Assign yourself to the science of social media. Apply for reality shows. I’m not saying either of these don’t take competence or hard work - they do, more than is visible to most of us. But putting your focus on reality shows and social media makes you great at marketing. You will become very good at selling yourself or your brand. You will become known.

A small amount of fame is necessary for an arts career. You need to be known to a certain web of people. How many? Kevin Kelly famously said a thousand. A thousand true fans, willing to pay you a hundred bucks a year on a product you sell…that’s a living. But many artists confuse fame with competence and success. Marketing, particularly social media marketing, is less important than is commonly believed. Fame without the other two points of the triangle may result in a hot fifteen minutes, but your brand will eventually bottom out.

To be sustainable, you need to be good.

Competence

Competence, a quest for excellence, has no direct relationship to fame or success. I know many armchair artists who are excellent at what they do but are content to keep their pursuit silent and unknown. A hobby. Similarly, I know many working artists who can earn a living, but you don’t know their name.

Competence is the greatest insurance for long-term fame and success. Hanks and Streep are famous because they are highly competent. Fame and success tend to die off if there’s no competence to back it up.

Competence counts for more than we might think. Audiences are willing to pay for competence over fame. Some would say this is an overestimation of the audience’s intelligence and taste. There is always an audience for excellence, provided there is an infrastructure to support the nurturing and celebration of it.

We make this mistake all the time in theatre. We want to sell tickets, so we put a TV star in the lead role. The TV star is sometimes excellent, but often they’re not. Why should they be? Theatre is different to television. It requires different skills, different experiences. We sell tickets, and audiences are mildly satisfied, but they’re rarely thrilled. They aren’t driven to buy more tickets because they’re missing the true spark of delight from an experienced theatre actor. Here, theatre artists confuse fame with competence. The more famous a person isn’t necessarily a guarantee that they’re the best choice.

I value competence highly. I find it offensive if an emerging playwright hasn’t read Shakespeare until their eyes have fallen out of their head. Or an actor isn’t across the Academy Award nominees, or at the very least, obsessed with movies and television. But I’m a snob. No matter what, some competence, some insistent love of craft must be embedded in your practice, whatever it is. Otherwise, the novelty wears off pretty quickly.

Success

Success is the most wobbly of all the terms, and it’s the one that is most subjectively defined. But you must decide what success looks like for you. And it’s a decision only you can make. I fear that if you don’t make this choice, the choice will be made for you. You may spend years lusting after your parents’ acceptance because that’s what success unconsciously means for you. Or you may constantly be unsatisfied and miserable because money is more of a value for you than you realise, and for the first ten, twenty, thirty years of an arts career, you may earn less than minimum wage.

For me, success is writing. That is all I can control. It used to be getting published, or having my work performed on the main stage of a theatre company. Both of those things occurred before I was thirty. I was lucky and I worked hard. But then life kept going, and nothing changed, and I realised how little control I had over any of it. Some books got rejected. The theatre companies didn’t return my queries. The hustle wasn’t over. I hadn’t made it. I just had to keep going.

So I keep hustling. But I don’t put success in their hands. I try to put it in mine. If I’ve written something today, I’ve been successful. That’s it. I preached this to a group of young writers I was giving a seminar to a while ago. The seminar was about ‘how to get published’, the sort of thing that occupies every writer’s festival program. Wannabe authors hurry along, wanting to know the secret. Step one, I said, was to write a book. I asked the audience to raise their hands if they’d finished writing their book.

Less than a quarter raised their hands. I told the remaining audience that they’d be better off leaving my seminar immediately and finishing their book. Success is often just shutting up and doing the work.

A first-time writer, or a first-time actor, may experience success and fame without competence. There may be an instinctual competence, a kind of raw, un-developed instinct. These are the miracle stories that populate reality shows, or the fairy tale stories of people like Yalitza Aparicio, the lead actress in the film Roma. By all accounts, she is successful - she has an Academy Award nomination and a great deal of acclaim. But only Aparicio can know how useful this will be to her in the long run. Does she want to be an actor? Does she want it so badly she’ll travel the world for it, study the craft, learn every day? Will she have enough drive to persuade her family that the dream is worthy enough to disrupt the intimate threads of their lives? Only she can know. Because it is her choice.

Making the choice

If you’re in this for the long haul: pick your triangle point. Choose it deliberately, not reactively. Let it guide your decisions. Don’t let fame seduce you if what you really crave is competence. Don’t chase success as defined by others if your soul only wants to get better at your craft. And for god’s sake, don’t pretend you’re above money if what you want is a roof and a little peace. Art is not a higher calling. It’s a job. A wonderful, weird, aching, electrifying job. Treat it like one—and maybe, just maybe, it’ll love you back.